studies

Punishment Just Teaches Kids To Be Better Liars

Screaming at your toddler for finger-painting your computer won’t deter future acts of deviant self-expression, but it will probably help her tell a more convincing lie in ten years about the missing vodka in your liquor cabinet.

In a study most likely funded by crafty, far-sighted children hoping to dissuade stern parents from punishing them, researchers Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee explored how an environment with lots of punishment affects lying tendencies in 3 and 4 year-old children by presenting children at two West African preschools — one of which uses corporeal punishment — with a tempting opportunity to tell a lie about taking a forbidden peek at a toy.

According to the Art Markman of the Huffington Post, the researchers placed a toy in a room behind a child, giving that child instructions not to turn around and look, which of course most of the kids did either because toddlers are notoriously lacking in self-discipline or because Pixar’s tales of toy animus have been so widely dispersed that children on every continent are now terrified of being alone in a room with a toy that might come to life and demand to be played with.

In the school that used corporeal punishment, a whopping 90% of the kids lied about looking at the toy, whereas only about half the kids at the more placid school told the same, self-preserving fib. “Of course,” writes Markman, probably because he’s never seen Problem Child, “young children are often bad liars.”

FRIDAY, JUNE 3 — People with mental illness are more likely to die following a heart attack or serious cardiac event, a new study finds.

One explanation for this increased risk is that people with mental illness are 14 percent less likely to receive lifesaving treatments for their heart condition, researchers found.

Those treatments included coronary artery bypass graft (bypass surgery) and angioplasty (a procedure to open blocked arteries using a stent), both of which have been shown to improve outcomes for heart patients, researchers said.

The study, published June 1 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, examined 22 published studies that compared the level of care given to those with and without serious mental disorders.

“In 10 studies that specifically addressed care for people with schizophrenia, those with the disease received only half the interventions offered to those without schizophrenia,” lead researcher Alex J. Mitchell, of the University of Leicester and University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, said in a news release from the university.

Six studies involving more than 800,000 people found that the risk of death was 11 percent higher in the year after a cardiac event in people with a history of serious mental illness than those without.

“People with known mental health conditions have higher background rates of cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, inactivity and obesity. We already know that this is reflected in a higher rate of heart disease, but what we demonstrate here is that mortality is greater even after patients come under health care,” Mitchell said. “We don’t yet know the reason for these poorer outcomes but it is worrying that we also find such patients may receive less frequent lifesaving interventions.”

The study authors concluded more research is needed to determine whether patients with severe mental illness are declining treatment or whether physicians are not offering the same level of care to the mentally ill that they offer to their patients without mental disorders.